About The Novel

Raves & Praise

"Beautifully detailed and rich in exceptional characterization ... Curran's novel gently reminds readers that fantasy has a place in everyone's life, and dreams can come true. Uniquely uplifting and never didactic, this is a gem." -BOOKLIST, starred review

"With a masterful wit and clever twists, Sheila Curran has created an intricately woven mystery. Captivating, fast-paced, no-holds-barred storytelling, DIANA LIVELY IS FALLING DOWN defies pigeon-holing. Wrestling the complexities of motherhood, loss and betrayal, politics, the environment, and theme parks, it is at once intimate, domestic, and worldly. A debut to celebrate!" -Julianna Baggott, GIRLTALK, THE MISS AMERICA FAMILY, THE MADAM

"Brilliant, touching, and funny as hell, Diana Lively packs a powerful punch. A poignant and biting satire of contemporary family life, American business, ivory-tower academics, and trans-Atlantic cultural differences, this spirited romp through an Englishwoman's Arizona deserves a unique place of honor on any bookshelf. Diana is one of those stories that can linger forever in one's own memory and imagination, as a reference point for every new book that comes along, or even more, for life itself. Wry, engaging, and wise beyond words, Diana is bound to delight and amaze." -Carlos Eire, 2003 National Book Award winner, WAITING FOR SNOW IN HAVANA

"DIANA LIVELY IS FALLING DOWN is a terrific pick-me-up. You couldn't find two more disparate landscapes than Oxford, England and Arizona, and that's exactly what one British woman discovers when she crosses the pond to find herself a fish-out-of-water -- only to realize that for the first time in her life, this means she can stand on her own two feet. Filled with characters who make you laugh out loud even as they break your heart, this is a funny, warm, inventive, original book."
-Jodi Picoult, NYT bestselling author of VANISHING ACTS and MY SISTER'S KEEPER

Traffic

My daughter
turned 18 last month. She graduated from high school and leaves for college
(summer session) in eight days.Did I
mention she’s my baby?

I had a rare chance to step back
into full-court maternal shoes last Sunday.AT&T, it seems, doesn’t care if you’re 18, doesn’t care if you’ve
got the credit card.They want the
account holder of record to sign on the dotted line for replacement (#3) of
Steve Jobs’ prank on parents everywhere, the gift that keeps on giving.Since when did iPhones become absolutely
necessary for daily life?It’s hard for
me to argue too much: I have one (a gift?!) that I’m quite attached to.I carry it around in an OTTER cover that is,
my kids tell me, a bit out of fashion, a bit on the bulky side.

“But it protects it!” I say, meaning so much
more.

Meaning
all these things you take for granted, my lovely children of privilege, these
weren’t things I grew up expecting or having.Meaning, the world has changed and I’m fearful for you, fearful I may
have spoiled you with my tendency to err on the side of safety.(We bought our teenage drivers new cars with
the latest in side-curtain air bags and 5 star crash ratings.The luxury they enjoyed was incidental to our
need to know we’d done the best we could to protect them against the #1
cause of death in teens and the # 2 cause of anti-anxiety medication in
parents.)

The iPhone sort of came along accidentally, it
came as a celebration of being 16.It
became the guest that would not leave.It insinuated itself into all of our lives with its charming features, the photos we
treasure, the music we adore, the texts saying “I’m safe!” Mine has my yoga
apps and my Audible books.I use the
alarm.I’ve come to rely on it.

That said, I know it’s a
luxury.So, what’s a mother to do when
her otherwise perfect daughter doesn’t use the suggested protective cover and
breaks (and soaks) said iPhone for the third time?I felt some sort of lesson was in order.

She
drove, I lectured.Softly, but surely, I
pressed my case: taking care of her things, consequences. If this happened
again she was going to be on her own.I
spoke about my own phone, how I’d had it for two years thanks to the OTTER and
if she wanted to keep hers, it really would behoove her to put it into a
protective case and watch it like a hawk.

We had other errands to run after
the phone purchase.She dropped me at
the grocery where I raced through the crowded aisles, efficient, driven toward
getting everything on the list.I made
it through Publix in record time.It was
only when I was asked to pay that I peered into my purse to discover the
deluge.Everything was sopping wet.My water bottle had exploded.My iPhone was telling me my daughter had
called 3 times but when I pressed the screen nothing would work.

It just so happened I’d bought a bag
of rice.Thank God and plans for risotto.

I perched on the step outside the
store, hoping my daughter would soon drive by. I couldn’t release the catch on
the damn hard plastic casing, the merits of which I’d oversold only minutes
before.I opened the bag with my teeth,
pressed my phone inside and hoped my girl would arrive soon.I had left the house wearing yoga pants and teeshirt.I looked like a New Age bag lady, a full
shopping cart next to my crouched form, muttering and laughing to myself.I fiddled with the OTTER’s latch while
simultaneously praying that reverse osmosis rice trick was working despite the
plastic casing.

Time was of the essence.I knew my daughter couldn’t reach me.When I saw her drive into the lot, I rushed
out, flagged her down.“Pull over!” I
shouted, handing her the bag with rice and phone.“Can you get the cover off?You won’t believe what happened!”

On the way home, I was still giggling.She was too.

I
said “Well, there’s this biblical saying.Pride goeth before a fall.”

I think that was the real wisdom I
needed to impart.Not that stewardship
and responsibility aren’t important, but that straight A student of mine pretty
much already knew that. What she needed
to hear was that no matter how mature you are, no matter how learned, there are
times when life makes idiots of us all. (Apologies to the Bard.) Forget consequences, remember this.Just when you think you’ve got control, you
realize you don’t.Better still, when
the going gets tough, there’s nothing better than to laugh outright at your own
silly self, knowing that in the end, there is only this, humor, frailty, human
interdependence, and the joy of knowing there will always be something new that
life has to teach you.

Today I woke up with my husband's arms around me. I felt wrapped in the love of friends and family in three time zones..

Before I went into surgery I took the risk of asking the anesthesiologist to recite three positive statements as I went into and out of my general anasthetic. They were: My surgery will go well and my body will begin to heal immediately. My surgeon will find all the carcinomas and extract them cleanly. When I wake up I will feel happy and be able to speak, swallow, laugh and go to the bathroom. (This last revealing my true inner peasant.)

I don't know what did it but I came out of surgery feeling better than I have in ages. I decided I'd like to go home and enjoy the company of my family. My doctor said that would be fine. Within hours I was lying on my couch, getting foot rubs from my friend Umi and then Julianna while Jane massaged my temples and told me how wonderful I was. John built a fire, my sister and brother made me laugh, my daughter sparkled as always, and I felt my life couldn't be more complete than that. My surgeon called and checked on me, and told me, incidentally, that he was reading DIANA LIVELY and really enjoying it. I think that might have been when I asked him to marry me. As my sister, the nurse, said, "Are you sure he's a real surgeon? He's way too nice."

I keep wondering if I might be dreaming, since I feel no worse today than if I had a minor sore throat. Better yet, my usual state of guilt about the world and what I should be doing to improve it has lifted to allow me to simply be. My new religion is this: we can ask for good wishes to be sent, and the healing energy of love is even better than the superbly miraculous state of modern pharmaceuticals. For all of you out there who've emailed and prayed and sent me smoothie recipes and promised to kiss my neck, bless you. There is a god and s/he lives in the quantum mechanics of hope and grace winging their way towards those we love.

"It's only Arugula but I thought it was a tree frog!" I explained when I jumped and howled at a moving green thing. Never mind that it was in the silverware basket in my dishwasher: I've been feeling rather traumatized of late. Many days and nights, when I take my pup/monster/hunter-gatherer-of-plastic-wrapped-peoplefood out to pee I open the door forgetting where I live and my hand will graze something very-unlike-metal, very-like-a-squirming-hopping-moving-GREEN UNMENTIONABLE the size of my fingernail, whereupon I will yelp and scream and do what my husband calls "the mystery dance" because I have just touched one of the things that most frighten me, a tiny, hopping tree frog. I cannot say what is worse, the idea that I have killed it, or the idea that it's still alive.

Which brings me to my current subject: the sudden and somewhat swooping popularity of paranormal women's fiction, which, according to Publisher's Lunch is "hot" enough to keep Penguin out of the red for another year or so. Jennifer Egan's THE KEEP is one example and was fortunate enough to be reviewed recently on the cover of the Sunday New York Times Book Review as well as featured on my favorite radio program. THE KEEP has several elements of the gothic novel, a form that was taken extremely UNSERIOUSLY until it suddenly intrigued the author of a previous National Book Award nominee and -- apparently -- quite a few of the reviewers WHO MUST BE OBEYED . Then there is Anne Frazier's new book, THE PALE IMMORTAL after which a video YOUTUBE movie was made, which scared the Bejeesuz out of me with nary a mention of green hoppying tree frogs.

And then there is a mass killing at a Maine Ski Resort and even the psuedo confession of Mark Karr to Jon Benet Ramsey. What I find notable about these last two things is very odd reaction I had to them, and may explain the current atttraction of spooky. It's not-quite-real-but-also-not-lurking on your door-handle-freaking-you-out of your Crocs kind of adrenalizing. We prefer scaring ourselves silly with things that are truly unlikely to harm us, because global warming and incompetent government, to say nothing of the mathematical likelihood of my son being drafted to make sure the Washington guys don't look like they're "cutting and running" seem ever more likely to happen.

Maybe I'm the only one who reacted this way but when the news came on about the possibility of finding the man who killed that poor little beauty contesting girl, I threw myself into a full frontal google for several days and the main emotion I had was nostalgia. Ah, the good old days, when what scared you was random but unlikely and something that you might be able to protect yourself from given good old paranoid instincts, some dead bolts and a few well-chosen pit bulls.

Will Katie change her name, the pundits are asking. That's the least of my questions.

It's hard to dislike Tom Cruise, because he's got that endearing megawatt smile, but if Scientologists are against antidepressants, I can only imagine what they'll think of epidurals or percosets. Will Katie be counselled to drink decaf and avoid rum cake? Will she stand up for her God-given right to numb her nether regions during the "discomfort" of the "procedure?" Will she be alert for post-partum fantasies in which a Top Gun jet is spiraling in flames into the ocean? These are the questions I'm only beginning to ask.

Hearing the news about the bombings in London brought so many feelings to the fore, each of them jostling for room in my rattled psyche. There was relief, that no one I knew was visiting, at least that I could think of. There was shame, that I've allowed myself, for the last month, to get into a terrific panic over my first book coming out, in the face of real horror. There was worry, as I realized that I do know people in England. There is Nicki, there is Denise, there is the whole MacFarlane family in Oxford. And there are all the people who were so nice to me when we lived there as a child, or when I lived there in the nineties, people I might not know, but who'd done nothing at all to deserve getting blown up on their way to work.

I flipped on the TV to see a mangled double-decker bus, its signature red body splayed like a giant had stepped on it. The bus was surrounded by bobbies in yellow mackintoshes. Both the bus and the English bobby have always been images of safety and order, reminescent of illustrations in a million picture books. Except on my screen, instead of Richard Scarry or Pat the Postman, we have the monsters of Maurice Sendak, invisible this time, except for the trail of debris they leave behind.

I remember soon after nine-eleven, someone sent me a page from The Onion, in which the headlines said something like "GOD REPEATS DIRECTIONS: NO #&$ING KILLING. I MEAN IT THIS TIME. NO KILLING."

The two books I read on my vacation, THE KITE RUNNER and UNDER THE BANNER OF HEAVEN seem especially pertinent today. Though one was a novel about Afghanistan and the other a non-fiction account of a Fundamentalist Mormon sect in the American West, both offered examples of how absolute moral certainties can go terribly, horribly wrong. Krakauer's discussion of the murder of a woman and her infant by her own brothers-in-law, who believed God was directing them to cleanse the earth of her (because she disagreed with their interpretation of God's word) and Hosseini's rending tale of an Afghani family torn apart by the rise of the Taliban affected me deeply. I'm left questioning the role of faith in the world. In my novel, DIANA LIVELY IS FALLING DOWN, one of the protagonists experiences the exhilaration of belief after the emptiness of atheism, and this faith provides the propelling force for his actions thereafter. When my brother died in 1992, I had a similar awakening, which I can only describe as a sense of wonder, accompanied by awe and a profound sense of mystery. Such belief, it seems to me, can only be a positive thing, until I see it used to justify the taking of another's life.

I'm reminded of a favorite Kafka quote, just a fragment that has stayed with me:

"Faith, like a guillotine, as heavy, as light."

I've always loved the way that simile captures the intense heady exhilaration of belief, and also its power to change everything in one irrevocable instant. But now I see something I never did before about the nature of the metaphor. The guillotine, that instrument of the revolution, bloodied by hands so bent on enacting revenge that they lost sight of the humanity of their victims.

Now I think this: it's great to experience the magic wonder of hoping in a larger Good, but we need to be careful that our own revelations don't blind us to the only certainty I can extract from any of this: Do Unto Others As You Would Have Them Do Unto You, and that means, No Killing, I'm Not F%#$-ing kidding."